Specific Dyslexia ("Congenital Word-Blindness"): A Clinical and Genetic Study

The term "specific dyslexia" is used to denote the disorder commonly known in medical literature as congenital word blindness. During the past few years there have appeared an enormous number of publications dealing with reading disabilities in children. The majority of these are concerned only with reading and do not touch on writing disabilities. In the educational and psychological literature, stress has been laid on the causal significance of secondary factors, but statistical comparisons of groups of children with reading disabilities and control groups have failed to show an association between most of these factors and reading disabilities. The question of the significance of hereditary factors is of considerable theoretical and practical interest, and in the present study the main interest has been focused on the genetic aspects of congenital word blindness. In the larger cities in Sweden, children with specific dyslexia are registered systematically in the schools. The author